The latest post by Dr. Scott McLeod on his blog Dangerousy Irrelevant questions what K-12 educators may be/are “secretly hoping” through a humourous little cartoon (I won’t re-post it here, because unlike Dr. McLeod, I don’t have permission; you’ll need to click on the link to see it).
Now obviously there isn’t a blanket answer here for all K-12 educators. I’m also sure Scott McLeod is already well aware of some of the issues I’m going to take up here, but I’m going to do it anyway for the sake of being able to achieve some semblance of a train of thought this evening (my brain seems to have switched off).
For some teachers, sadly, there is a hope that the content they have always taught will be eternally relevant. For others, there is a realisation that today’s content isn’t going to be the be-all-and-end-all for their students. Those teachers can and do make amazing things happen in their classrooms. I hope that sometimes, just sometimes, such glimmers of hope do shine momentarily out of my classroom windows. Yet we also need to remember that such fantastic teachers are restricted and frustrated by systems, curriculums, governments and sometimes even school communities that simply haven’t made the realisation yet.
I also think I need to make a point that might make some teachers of long division, state capitals and cursive writing feel a little better. Just because you teach these things doesn’t make you a bad, or even outdated teacher. What you need to be concerned about is whether this content is the sole driving force of your teaching. Any teacher who remembers their Educational Psychology from uni, particularly the work of Piaget, will remember schemas. Yes people! The idea that new knowledge is constructed and understood through the addition to, extension, or even redefining or disproving of existing understandings (this is a very watered down explanation, I know). So let’s not slam content completely. There is content that children need to learn in school that they will need as the basis for developing further understanding throughout their lives.
On the other hand, anyone who thinks a person is going to get a job based on their abilities in long division and cursive handwriting, and their knowledge of captial cities, is not thinking all that realistically. There is a certain amount of content that children need to learn in school (or perhaps they negotiate what they need to learn and construct their own understandings; perhaps a discussion for another time). Perhaps the best way of seeing the content is that helps contextualise the learning of skills and values that I think the fabulous, innovative teachers are seeing as becoming increasingly important to develop within students.
Let’s take the long division as an example. In the outcomes-based syllabuses of the state of New South Wales, the outcome connected with the learning of long division is this:
NS3.2 Selects and applies appropriate strategies for multiplication and division
Long division is only one part of that of course. Yet it’s only when you go into the content that you see what the NSW Mathematics Syllabus demands. Embedded within this are a whole range of skills, including:
- estimating
- selecting appropriate strategies (yes, long division is not always the best way)
- using operations in real-life situations
- checking answers in the original situation
- giving valid reasons for an answer, etc., etc.
These skills are all tied in with the five outcomes that make up the Working Mathematically strand of the syallabus. It’s the embedding of these skills into the learning that make this syllabus a marked improvement on the old one (which was exceptional for its time).
So where am I going with all of this? Well, the point I’m looking to make is this. The shift needs to be away from a focus on learning content, and being satisfied we’ve achieved as teachers because our children know the content. After all, new content is produced at an alarming rate; we cannot begin to imagine everything that our children will need to know when they leave school. The shift needs to be towards learning essential content through the mastery of lifelong learning skills. If children know how to learn, and value learning, then that is what will make them a valuable commodity in the labour market of the future, because they will be able to apply themselves to what needs to be done.
I can take my own experience as a rough example. When I started school, there were no computers, so there definitely weren’t any Learning Technology Coordinators. When computers were introduced, I learnt how to type, how to word process on the old Apple program Multiscribe, played Sim City, eventually used a PC once I got to uni, etc. Yet once I actually became an LTC (after already teaching for a little while), none of the software I’d learnt as a child was going to help me - it wasn’t there. My primary school wasn’t networked in 1989, we could only save our own data on magnetic disks… you get the picture. A lot of what I do now has been learnt through getting a taste from someone, somewhere, perceiving that it’s something we need as a school (and consequently that I need to learn), and having an interest in playing around till I get the hang of it. One of these days, we LTCs will have done ourselves out of a job, because using computers in classrooms will be as common as writing on a chalkboard, and I’ll be looking for the next thing I need to learn.
